"We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged. Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today" -- Publisher's description

Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel -- someone has said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy , like The Dark Lady of Belorusse and The Black Swan , both selected by The New York Times as Notable Books of the Year, is a tour de force of memory and imagination. In this third and final installment, the higher truths of a masterly writer's art render moot the question of exactly where the real world ends and Charyn's imagined world begins. Still known as "Baby" although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of 12-year-old wannabe gangsters that meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian émigré. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans -- a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans -- and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx." So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster called "The Little Man" -- Meyer Lansky. In Charyn's hands, the often ridiculed Bronx is a magic place, as full of odd and wonderful characters as a three-ring circus. And at the center of it all, young "Baby," not as lucky in love as he would like to be, drinking it all in, putting his own extraordinary take on it. Charyn looks back at this with his singular vision, and records it all for us with the skill of the fine writer he is. This is a delightful and often moving story of a childhood that could only have been lived in New York in the fifties, a New York experience that could only have taken place in the Bronx of those days, a growing-up saga that could only have been captured by this singular author.

An imaginative account of the real-life love affair between Bill Hickok and Sally Ovenshine, in the adventurous days of the American West, follows the two lovers from their strange initial meeting through Hickok's violent death

"In Bitter Bronx, one of our most gifted and original novelists depicts a world before and after modern urban renewal destroyed the gritty sanctity of a land made famous by Ruth, Gehrig, and Joltin' Joe. Bitter Bronx is suffused with the texture and nostalgia of a lost time and place, combining a keen eye for detail with Jerome Charyn's lived experience. These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders." In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories―"Silk & Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"―Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times)".--Dust jacket.

His love was like a hurricane Jocko Robinson is the 97th richest man in America and the creator of The Lamplighter, the world-popular TV crime series. But that doesn't stop Jocko from getting shot in the head while looking for a tofu burger in Los Angeles. And that won't stop Jocko from falling helplessly in love with the Hurricane Lady, a former model who calls herself Inertia and serves a crime lord from Cologne. A man in love among a tangle of lovers, Jocko is desperately trying to pry Inertia away from her life of mayhem and promiscuity. To succeed, Jocko has to enter the realm of his own fantasy -- and somehow find a way out again.